Zim and Dib Go To Ani Con
by Vanilla Velvet
Summary: With Dib chasing him, Zim takes refuge in a strange building that he has never seen before.
1. Chapter 1

Zim and Dib go to AniCon

Thanks so much for the warm welcome!

Now I know I have to say this: I do not own Zim! The show. I do have the action figure, though. And a T shirt. That's all the Zim things I own.

I feel like something like this must have been done before, but if it was I couldn' find it. Anyway, I still think this was a good idea.

Chapter One

Zim looked back over his shoulder, saw Dib catching up to him, and ran faster. It seemed they must have been running for miles.

It all started when Zim stepped out out of his house that Saturday morning to get his normal earth newspaper. Suddenly there was a bright flash and Dib jumped from behind Zim's fence, holding up his camera and shouting, "Victory for DIB!"

Zim looked down at himself in horror. He wasn't wearing his disguise! He didn't think he needed to put on his brilliant disguise just to step out to get a normal earth newspaper.

But then he noticed the lens cap was still on Dib's camera, he couldn't resist pointing it out to him. "Nice earth camera, Dib. Is that the new model they're all talking about, the one that doesn't even need a lens?" Zim smugly smirked.

Dib flushed bright red and yanked the lens cap off. He aimed the camera straight at Zim's face and shouted, "Today will be the day I take THE picture of you, Zim! The picture that makes everyone BELIEVE!" Dib pulled himself up the fence and jumped into Zim's yard, landing between Zim and the door of Zim's house.

The gnomes started doing their job then, and the shrieking Dib chased Zim out of his own yard. Dib chased Zim up the street, shrieking with anger now, trying to focus his camera and snapping blurry pictures all the while. Gir appeared at the door, picked up the earth newspaper, and waved. "Enjoy playing with Big Head Boy, Master! See you in time for the Scary Monkey Show! When you come back bring tacoooos!" Then the door with the men's room sign on it slammed shut, and Zim ran harder than ever.

Zim ran and Dib chased him, and eventually they ended up all the way on the other side of town. Zim found out the town was a lot bigger than he ever thought it was, put it that way. The earth humans who lived in this end of town were a lot less angular, for one thing, and they were neither as skinny nor as fat at the humans he was used to. They were all an unhealthy looking shade of reddish pink, and nobody had green or purple hair.

By now, Zim was running out of breath. He knew he couldn't go on running much longer. He didn't want to take out his spider legs and use them to run, someone might notice something unusual about that. Up ahead was a large building with many humans, and other creatures as well, going into it. It reminded him a lot of the stream of Irkens going into the hall on Conventia. Zim knew losing Dib in this crowd was his best chance to shake him off.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

There were even more humans etc. inside the building than there were outside. Zim also saw samurais and people wearing wide shiny headbands some of them half naked and brightly colored frogs and girls in lacy dresses. There were so many things he'd never even imagined and didn't know how to describe; Zim knew it would be easy to lose Dib in this crowd! There were also a lot of signs with arrows pointing everywhere but Zim didn't have time to read any of them.

With his superior information-collecting ability, Zim had heard of places like these, but until now he had thought they were only filthy lies. So this one filthy lie was true. But the rest were all still filthy lies.

Just as Zim was about to run into the main hall, but an earth guard stopped him. "Hold it right there," he said, "you have to register

first."

"I AM...! An Irken invader... and I go! Where I please!"

"Of course you can go wherever you please, just as soon as you register." The earth guard pointed Zim towards a long table with boxes and boxes of cards on it and several harried looking guys behind it, looking through the boxes and signing people up.

Anything to get away from Dib; if Zim couldn't lose him in here he never would. Zim pushed aside a tall clumsy human dressed as a tall clumsy robot and hastily threw some earth moneys at the registration drone behind the long table. Just in time he remembered to scribble his name in the earth language instead of Irken. Taking his card, Zim shook his fist. "You realize when we take over your filthy earth planet your inferior earth moneys will be even more no good than they are now!"

A wave of thumbs up greeted this, making Zim even madder at the humans who didn't know a deadly Irken invader when they saw one. But just then he saw Dib's hair scythe appeared over the crowd at the door, and Zim turned and ran into the main hall.

Once inside, Dib paused for just a second, looking around in astonishment at all the signs. Some of them were over six feet high. Others had arrows pointing in all directions, reading things like "Cosplay Contest," "Martial Arts Tournament," and "Meet Jhonen Vasquez!"

"Interesting, but I've got no time for any of that," Dib told himself. "And what a weird name!"

This building was usually used for hockey games and rock concerts, and provided emergency shelter the last time a hurricane had hit thte town, but now it was full of young people who were all obviously very much into anything animated, Japanese, either, or both. Until that moment Dib thought these gatherings were no more than stories the high school kids had made up to tease the younger ones. This proved it paid to find things out for yourself, no matter how crazily impossible they seemed to be.

The registration guys were still chuckling over Zim's clever, inspired cosplay when Dib, panting just a bit less now, staggered up to their table. "Did you guys... see an alien... come in here?"

Humoring Zim had taken up all of the registration team's sense of humor."At least twenty or thirty, so far, kid. So I vote pizza, you vote Chinese, whaddya you want, Hank?"

A short fat guy at the far end of the table looked up from a bag of cheese covered corn chips and shouted back he wanted both.

"Which way did he go?" Dib continued asking.

One of the guys finally stopped talking about lunch and asked Dib, "Which alien?"

"You know, the one as tall as me, green and with no ears or nose!" Dib gasped out. "He's wearing a red uniform and a PAK on his back! This is far more important than what you're going to have for lunch! He's here to destroy the earth and I'm the only one who can stop him!"

The guys behind the desk looked at each other and almost fell of their chairs laughing.

"Hey buddy, aren't you going a little far with that?" one of them said when he could finaly stop laughing. "Even Dib himself wouldn't be such a dork."

Dib sighed. He saw he could expect no help whatsoever from the staff, and only by coughing up the fee (extra because he didn't bother to pre-register) and registering himself would he be able to continue chasing Zim. But before he did, Dib breathlessly asked once more, "Which way did he go?"

The two guys on both sides of the guy attaching Dib's registration card to his lanyard gave each other a quick look. "He went THATAWAY!" they shouted together, pointing in opposite directions before all three doubled up in laughter. With an annoyed look, Dib grabbed his registration card and still putting it over his head, raced into the main hall.

If Zim was anywhere in here, Dib was going to find him. If he wasn't Dib would leave as sson as he had inspected the whole building.

He made his way through the gathering crowd, asking everyone, "Did you see an alien?"

Everyone laughed at him. That much wasn't any different for him, that much was just business as usual. It was the fact that almost everyone was wearing a costume. They all seemed to be dressed as Totoros, Asukas, Godzillas, Gokus, Keroros, Akiras, Narutos, Sasukes and everything else one could imagine, which made it a very sureal experience.

Dib thought he saw Zim a few times, but each time it only turned out to be someone cosplaying Zim. Even when they tried doing Zim's quotes, it was immediately obvious that this wasn't the real Zim. And when one of them batted eyes coquettishly and tried to kiss him, he KNEW no way could that ever be Zim. Holding his mouth, Dib dashed for the nearest men's room (the fake "Zim" couldn't follow, he was really a girl) before puking and barfing and retching his every last gut out at the very idea.

When Dib came out again, he did so slowly, looking around carefully to make sure that sex-crazed impostor was nowhere around. But he forgot all about that when he knew he was looking at the real thing.


	3. Chapter 3

Aneera: That was a great idea! But I'd already had half of this chapter written up. Maybe next time!

Chapter Three

Out of the corner of his eye, Dib noticed something he had seen many times before. Immediately he looked up and saw Zim using his spider legs to climb up a wall! No human being could ever fake that without a complicated arrangement of greenscreens and CGI.

Dib now saw the open window Zim was heading towards, and knew he would have to move fast. He turned around and saw an extension cord lying on the floor. He yanked it out of the wall, causing a loud shout of annoyance in the nearest hall as the discussion going on inside it ground to a halt. But Dib heard none of this. He was too busy making a lasso out of the cord and trying to rope Zim with it.

The nearest door burst open and a very angry man with fiery red hair and wearing a trench coat and with a microphone on his ear came out. Despite Dib's protests, he yanked the cord out of Dib's hand and plugged it back into the wall, but it didn't matter. Zim had lost his footing and as the man, his trench coat flapping indignantly, went back into the hall and slammed the door after him, Zim crashed to the floor in front of Dib.

Zim leapt up and ran off once more, past the "JtHM Seminar" sign with Dib in hot pursuit. They ran past big and small knots of people, ran between people taking photos of each other, knocked down signs and standees, and had any number of people shout angrily after them. Finally Zim raced down an almost deserted hall into another room, Dib closing in on his heels, just in time to hear the announcement, "Contestants, choose your weapons!"

Seeing Dib instantly take the handle of a steel katana with both hands, Zim hastily turned around and grabbed a weapon of his own from the nearest table. However it turned out to be a bokken, the wooden practice sword. With a loud scream, Dib charged at Zim, who instinctively held up his bokken to defend himself, but the fight didn't last long when Dib's katana splintered Zim's wooden bokken in two halves down its entire length.

"Ha!" Dib crowed, pointing at what reamained of Zim's bokken.

Zim dropped the halves and ran out the door. Dib flung the clattering katana back on the table and ran after him, shouting, "And that was just the start of it, Zim! I'll do that to YOU next!"

This small taste of victory encouraged Dib a lot, and as they ran into the next room he nearly managed to tackle the alien. The next room was the vending room, and as they ran up and down rows of tables covered with comics, action figures, keychains, figurines and T shirts, they kept bumping into people and knocking both cash and merchandise to the floor.

An angry security guard soon came charging up. "Get outa here now before I grab your passes and chuck you out!" the security guard roared at them.

Zim ducked into another room, but not quickly enough for Dib to miss seeing him which room he went into. However, neither of them noticed the sign on their way in.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

They were just in time for the judging of a costume contest.

"Late entries," the doorkeeper scolded them. "You shouldn't have bought so much stuff at the vendors's tables, guys. Just five minutes later and you would of been too late!" He pushed one numbered card at Zim and another at Dib. He then pointed Zim to the center of the room, where the assembly seemed to have been waiting for him and only him. Row after row of costumed convention goers were staring at Zim expectantly, and applause which seemed to have been dying down, burst out again.

As always, Zim was only too happy to take his place at the center stage. He marched to the center of the room and proceeded to give a long, fiery speech about how they were all his slaves and how they had really come here to worship him, how the Irken armada was on its way even then but begging for mercy wouldn't save them, etc. Finally Dib couldn't stand to listen to this rant any longer, and rushed at Zim.

The finishing touch to Zim's "cosplay" was the spiderleg demonstration he put on next. As he jabbed Dib with the spiderlegs as he polevaulted and pivoted with them, easily keeping just out of his reach the whole time, everybody oohed and aahed. It wowed the crowd even more than the Naruto sword fight and the Keororo frogs dance.

After all that, the judges and the crowd couldn't choose anyone except Zim for the first prize. Everyone applauded like crazy as the MC handed Zim the First Prize, an envelope full of earth monies, and of course Zim crowed, "Victory for ZZZIIIMMM! Kneel before your Irken superior, you filthy inferior earth monkey worm babies!" The crowd did better than kneel, it applauded even more wildly, whistled and stomped.

As the applause raised the roof, Dib fell back against the wall and slowly sank to the floor. It just wasn't fair. Even when Zim came right out and told everybody exactly who he was and why he was here, not only did they not catch on, they loved Zim all the more for it. Meanwhile he, Dib, who was trying to protect them all, got pushed aside and laughed at. Dib turned around so he was facing the wall. With his back to the crowd, he covered his face and for the first time ever, thought about giving up.

A hand tapped his shoulder and he sighed, expecting to be thrown out, if not arrested or worse. He started to climb tiredly to his feet. However, the MC was offering him a MacMeaty's gift certificate. "No one believes you're actually Dib," the man was saying, "But since you've been trying so hard to convince everybody, here's a consolation prize for you."

The MacMeaty's double cheese hamburger with fries, shake and sundae that Dib enjoyed on his way home that evening was the best he had ever tasted. It was his first compensation ever from the people of the earth to the savior of humanity. Give up? Never!

THE END.

I just noticed the strangest thing happened. I started this fic from Zim's point of view, but somewhere along the way, I ended up more writing it as Dib's! Did that ever happen to any of your stories?

Is this thing on? Testing, testing... is anyone reading these?


End file.
